Business talk drives even dinner conversations for second-generation entrepreneur

Feb. 17, 2013

Julie Godshall Brown serves dinner for her family at thier home in Greenville. / PATRICK COLLARD

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She’s up before the crack of dawn to hit the gym and back home by 7 a.m. to make sure her two sons have a good breakfast before school. Dressed in a stylish suit and with her blond hair perfectly coiffed, she’s out the door again before 8.

Back home around 5 p.m., she lets the new puppy, Millie, out and starts getting dinner on the table. As everyone pours in from work and school and wrestling practice, they pause as a family to join hands and give thanks for their food before digging in the way only 12- and 14-year-old boys can.

Once the kids are in bed at 9 p.m. — and after the occasional meetings of community boards and organizations — she piles the ingredients for the next night’s dinner in the slow cooker, grabs the latest John Grisham novel or edition of the Harvard Business Review and heads to bed.

Meet Julie Godshall Brown: Superwoman.

At least that’s the only explanation longtime friend Will McCauley had for how she handles so much so well.

And while those hours between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. might seem as if they’d almost be a break from her hectic personal life, for Brown, who owns Godshall Staffing and Professional Recruiting, her day job is like part of her family.

Brown’s parents started the business in 1968, before Brown and her sister were born, and Brown took over 10 years ago when she was just 32 years old.

Steeped in the business around her family’s kitchen table, Brown said she knew from an early age that she was destined for its halls. And by working hand in hand with her father for years, she was able to sidestep many of the succession problems that strike family businesses to keep the legacy thriving and the family name shining on the side of the building.

Laws of succession

“Sometimes I think family business can be a default for people, and I can say that was not the case for me. It was definitely a conscious choice, and it was not one that I felt like I had to do,” Brown said.

According to the Baylor University Institute for Family Business, 90 percent of U.S. businesses are family owned or controlled. Research estimates that only about 30 percent will survive to the second generation.

A decade after Brown’s takeover, the staffing and personnel company is still thriving, even in the face of the economic downturn and slow-to-recover unemployment levels, a success that Brown said is credited to the solid framework her father built into the business and the energy she puts into maintaining it.

Brown said there’s a running joke in the family that she never really accepted her first job at Godshall.

After finishing school, Brown went to work for another company first. “I did not want it (Godshall Staffing) to be the only thing I had ever done,” she said.

When that company was closing the Liberty location where she worked, she started looking around at other options, going on some job interviews and deciding whether now was the time to make the move to the family business.

“He said think about it, think about what you want to do,” she recalled her father, Wayne Godshall, saying.

“I talked to my mom a few days later and she’s like, ‘Your dad is so excited. He’s ordered your business cards,’” she said with a laugh.

It was nearly 20 years ago when she started as a recruiter. She bought the business from her dad in 2003, right about the same time the company bought and moved into a new building.

“Suddenly I was worth a whole lot more dead than alive,” she said with a laugh.

Brown said she never really expected her father to retire for good. She joked regularly about widening the doorways to accommodate a wheelchair for him as he aged. But when the time came, he walked away with nary a glance back.

“If you’d known him for years, you would think he would probably never retire. He set the time, he walked away,” said his wife Jessie, with no small measure of shock in her voice. “He just walked away.”

One of the most common hindrances to a smooth succession from the first generation to the second in a family-owned business is the unwillingness of the founder to relinquish control, said Ron Reece, a Greenville family business consultant.

“If we could get people to think of succession as vision, then it’s kind of exciting,” he said, but that’s a step that’s easier said than done. Typically, he said, “succession doesn’t happen without some pain and some scars.”

But by all accounts, Wayne Godshall and his daughter did it right.

“I would have thought that it would have been very difficult for him to let go, but he did,” Brown said. “He knew that’s what he should do for our success.”

Godshall, who still refers to the business as “we” out of habit but waves away any suggestion that he might miss it, said he had gradually given his daughter more and more of the reins over the years so that by the time of his retirement, she was nearly running the business on her own already.

“I really expected her to improve the business as the years went by, and she certainly has done that,” he said.

Silver slippers and golden handcuffs

Many kids want to be doctors or firefighters or even architects when they grow up. It’s more rare that a child would choose a career in human resources long before high school, but Brown said she knew growing that she wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps.

“Growing up in a family business, you get a taste for it almost by osmosis,” she said. “I just really always loved the environment. I loved the idea of it. A lot of it was just the pride of it.”

She was at the office often in her youth, a 12-year-old volunteer receptionist, and said answering the phones is still her favorite job.

“I probably at that stage didn’t really understand everything about what we do. I did understand that we were helping people and helping companies,” she said. “Even if I had not grown up in a recruiting business, I probably would have ended up in something where I was making those matches, where I was helping people.”

Brown followed her dream steadfastly, attending first Clemson University and then the University of South Carolina for a graduate degree in human resources. And when the time was right, she joined the firm and worked her way up to its leadership.

McCauley, a family business heir in his own right, said the second generation in a family-owned business faces unique challenges in taking over and keeping a business going.

“Silver slipper syndrome,” as he calls it, is the tendency of people to assume the new owner was simply anointed by birth, like a king, rather than earning her spot.

“Life is much harder in that scenario ironically because everybody’s watching you, all eyes are on you. It’s just harder to prove yourself,” he said.

Brown said concern over those feelings is what made her take a slow and deliberate path to leadership, working first in human resources outside of Godshall and then starting well below the executive level when she came on board.

Ginny Beach, VP of operations, started at Godshall about a year before Brown came on board and watched as the young woman took on more responsibility and eventually the business. Brown had proven her mettle, she said, and she felt a sense of relief that the business’ continuation had been assured.

Once she was the one behind the big desk, Brown was shackled with what McCauley called “golden handcuffs.”

“Now you’ve got a legacy. What do you do with that? You don’t go sell it. You’ve got even more expectations of carrying on the family business,” he said.

It is a weight, Brown said, but one that she’s proud to bear.

“I feel a heavy, heavy burden and obligation to always make sure that we’re doing the right thing for the long term because I feel like I’m carrying on a legacy,” she said. “I know I’m where the buck stops.”

Brown said Godshall, with its 17 internal employees and hundreds of temporary workers contracted to other businesses, is driven by a commitment to integrity and an eye on the future.

“I think we don’t make our decision just on the dollar, just on today. This isn’t just one of our branches. This is our legacy,” she said. “It’s a 45-year-old business. I want it to be here for another 45 years or longer.”

Balancing act

The weight of responsibility isn’t lifted from Brown’s shoulders when she walks out of the brick building on Cleveland Street. Active in the community, her time is also divided among projects and organizations and even the group of eighth-grade girls she leads at First Presbyterian Church.

She described herself as “high energy,” but McCauley’s sticking with his own theory.

“Entrepreneur-slash-Superwoman. There you go: Julie Godshall Brown,” he said.

Perpetually smiling and with an easy laugh, Brown dismissed any idea of finding a true “balance” between work and home.

“Mentally, I don’t know that you can keep it separate,” she said “I realized it’s sort of a flow more than it is a line in the sand.

“I don’t think that balance happens day by day or minute by minute. I think it seems to be some weeks I do more with the kids; other weeks I’m definitely not the model mama.”

She laughed that her boys are probably as steeped in the family business as she was as a kid, particularly since, like her parents, both she and her husband, Drew, work at Godshall, and dinner conversations easily revolve around what’s going on at the office.

“Our kids are in it deep,” she said with a laugh. “You don’t have the luxury of turning it off. It is who you are all the time.”

Sitting in a comfortable family room, just off the kitchen in her home overlooking Chanticleer Golf Course, Brown joked about needing a “wife,” someone to help clear the stacks of paper off the kitchen counter and fold the laundry before a guest was coming over.

But for all the things that keep her busy, family remains the top priority for Brown. And even if she is occasionally checking email by smartphone between halves, she’s also in the stands at basketball games and wrestling matches and on the bow of the boat with fishing pole in hand to spend time with her sons, Alex and Hayden.

She said she’d love it if one of her sons chose to follow in her footsteps at Godshall, but she’s not pushing. In fact, she said, there’s one way she’s definitely not like her father.